The Fractal Scope of Services and Consumer/Provider Roles

It is convenient to enforce the notion of scope in an SOA: "exposed services" only make sense when you define the scope and context in which they will be exposed. We refer to SOA as being fractal. This means that you can apply SOA and expose services in a fractal manner: you can define services for a project, a LOB, a few LOB's , an enterprise, an eco-system. For example, a Service Portfolio (part of the Service Model) will have an attribute of scope that helps define, for example, how each business unit has it's own set of services they use "internally" and also a set of services they expose "externally" to other LOBs and the rest of the enterprise. Each scope can be a Service Provider and a Service Consumer.

This addition of scope and role to the service model alleviates many issues in governance, boundaries, funding and indeed in the identification and specification of services in your SOA.